I was excited to read this news at austin360.com today:

Food & Wine magazine and the company behind the Austin City Limits Music Festival will produce the first Austin Food & Wine Festival in March 2012, organizers announced Tuesday.

The magazine, which has about 1 million subscribers, has been hosting the Aspen Food and Wine Classic in Colorado for almost 30 years, and it is involved with more than a dozen other events around the country, including food festivals in South Beach, Fla.; Los Angeles; New York; and Atlanta . The new festival, slated for March 30-April 1, will absorb the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival, which ends its 26-year run.

My wife and I have always wanted to go to the Aspen Food & Wine Classic. It’ll be great to have a similar event here in Austin. And it sounds like they’ll pull in some heavy-hitters.

Grdovic said the Austin festival will be similar to the South Beach Wine & Food Festival, the February soiree in which many of the biggest celebrity chefs in the country and their legions of followers descend upon Miami for events such as a tasting village on the beach that is three blocks long.

“It is like the mosh pit at Lollapalooza,” said Tampa Tribune food writer Jeff Houck . “South Beach has become the template by which other festivals have been born and compared to,” he said.

Along with the magazine and C3, the new festival is a collaboration with chefs Tyson Cole of Austin and Tim Love of Fort Worth and Austin restaurateur Jesse Herman of La Condesa and Malverde.

“Knowing the kind of powerhouse that Food & Wine magazine can bring to Austin, that was one of the huge incentives for us to do this,” said Cathy Cochran-Lewis, president of the Hill Country festival.

See you there in 2012!

via @DeniseFraser